Biography

Biography

I received my MSc and my PhD in Psychology at the University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy) under the supervision of Professor Paolo Cherubini. I conducted part of my PhD research as a visiting scholar at the University of California, San Diego, with Professors Craig McKenzie and David Huber. I earned my PhD in Social, Cognitive and Clinical Psychology in January 2011 with a thesis on the psychological mechanisms involved in hypothesis testing. I continued to work at the University of Milano-Bicocca as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow before joining the University of Surrey as a Lecturer in Psychology in October 2013.

Research interests

I am primarily interested in the asymmetries in our thinking processes. For example, one of the topics I have investigated is how the presence vs absence of features can differentially impact people's search and evaluation strategies. I have studied asymmetries in different domains such as social cognition and user authentication.

This strand of research might inform our understanding of relevant thinking processes that are also involved in medical diagnosis, legal investigations, and impression formation.

My current research projects concern: time perception in episodes of social exclusion and in relation to smoking behaviour; computational modelling of insight problems; visual-search strategies in user authentication; and the relation between trait adjectives and the perceived frequency of trait-inconsistent behaviours.

Research collaborations

Marco Brambilla, Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca.Andrea Carnaghi, Department of Life Sciences, University of Trieste.Paolo Cherubini, Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca.David Huber, Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.Marco Marelli, Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca.Tom Ormerod, School of Psychology, University of Sussex.Paolo Riva, Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca.Simona Sacchi, Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca.

Teaching

Semester 2 2016-17:

Social Cognition (Final Year UG and PG Module Convener) PSY3101-PSYM108

When examining social targets, people may ask asymmetric questions, that is, questions for which ?yes? and ?no? answers
are neither equally diagnostic nor equally frequent. The consequences of this information-gathering strategy on impression formation
deserve empirical investigation. The present work explored the role played by the trade-off between the diagnosticity and frequency of
answers that follow asymmetric questions. In Study 1, participants received answers to symmetric/asymmetric questions on an anonymous
social target. In Study 2, participants read answers to a specific symmetric/asymmetric question provided by different group members.
Overall, the results of both studies indicate that asymmetric questions had less impact on impressions than did symmetric questions,
suggesting that individuals are more sensitive to data frequency than diagnosticity when forming impressions.

Previous studies on hypothesis-testing behaviour have reported systematic preferences for posing positive questions (i.e., inquiries about features that are consistent with the truth of the hypothesis) and different types of asymmetric questions (i.e., questions where the hypothesis confirming and the hypothesis disconfirming responses have different evidential strength). Both tendencies can contribute - in some circumstances - to confirmation biases (i.e., the improper acceptance or maintenance of an incorrect hypothesis). The empirical support for asymmetric testing is, however, scarce and partly contradictory, and the relative strength of positive testing and asymmetric testing has not been empirically compared. In four studies where subjects were asked to select (Experiment 1) or evaluate (Experiments 2-4) questions for controlling an abstract hypothesis, we orthogonally balanced the positivity/negativity of questions by their symmetry/asymmetry (Experiments 1-3), or by the type of asymmetry (confirmatory vs disconfirmatory; Experiment 4). In all Experiments participants strongly preferred positive to negative questions. Their choices were on the other hand mostly unaffected by symmetry and asymmetry in general, or - more specifically - by different types of asymmetry. Other results indicated that participants were sensitive to the diagnosticity of the questions (Experiments 1-3), and that they preferred testing features with a high probability under the focal hypothesis (Experiment 4). In the discussion we argue that recourse to asymmetric testing - observed in some previous studies using more contextualized problems - probably depends on context-related motivations and prior knowledge. In abstract tasks, where that knowledge is not available, more simple strategies - such as positive testing - are prevalent.

This article examines individuals' expectations in a social hypothesis testing task. Participants selected questions from a list to investigate the presence of personality traits in a target individual. They also identified the responses that they expected to receive and the likelihood of the expected responses. The results of two studies indicated that when people asked questions inquiring about the hypothesized traits that did not entail strong a priori beliefs, they expected to find evidence confirming the hypothesis under investigation. These confirming expectations were more pronounced for symmetric questions, in which the diagnosticity and frequency of the expected evidence did not conflict. When the search for information was asymmetric, confirming expectations were diminished, likely as a consequence of either the rareness or low diagnosticity of the hypothesis-confirming outcome. We also discuss the implications of these findings for confirmation bias.

In two studies, we investigated how people use base rates and the presence versus the absence of new information to judge which of two hypotheses is more likely. Participants were given problems based on two decks of cards printed with 0-4 letters. A table showed the relative frequencies of the letters on the cards within each deck. Participants were told the letters that were printed on or absent from a card the experimenter had drawn. Base rates were conveyed by telling participants that the experimenter had chosen the deck by drawing from an urn containing, in different proportions, tickets marked either 'deck 1' or 'deck 2'. The task was to judge from which of the two decks the card was most likely drawn. Prior probabilities and the evidential strength of the subset of present clues (computed as 'weight of evidence') were the only significant predictors of participants' dichotomous (both studies) and continuous (Study 2) judgments. The evidential strength of all clues was not a significant predictor of participants' judgments in either study, and no significant interactions emerged. We discuss the results as evidence for additive integration of base rates and the new present information in hypothesis testing.

Evidence evaluation is a crucial process in many human activities, spanning from medical diagnosis to impression formation. The present experiments investigated which, if any, normative model best conforms to people?s intuition about the value of the obtained evidence. Psychologists, epistemologists, and philosophers of science have proposed several models to account for people?s intuition about the utility of the obtained evidence with respect either to a focal hypothesis or to a constellation of hypotheses. We pitted against each other the so called optimal-experimental-design models (i.e., Bayesian diagnosticity, log10 diagnosticity, information gain, Kullback-Leibler distance, probability gain, and impact) and measures L and Z to compare their ability to describe humans? intuition about the value of the obtained evidence. Participants received words-and-numbers scenarios concerning two hypotheses and binary features. They were asked to evaluate the utility of ?yes? and ?no? answers to questions about some features possessed in different proportions (i.e., the likelihoods) by two types of extraterrestrial creatures (corresponding to two mutually exclusive and exhaustive hypotheses). Participants evaluated either how an answer was helpful or how an answer decreased/increased their beliefs with respect either to a single hypothesis or to both hypotheses. We fitted mixed-effects models and we used the Akaike information criterion (AIC) and the Bayesian information criterion (BIC) values to compare the competing models of the value of the obtained evidence. Overall, the experiments showed that measure Z was the best-fitting model of participants? judgments of the value of obtained answers. We discussed the implications for the human hypothesis-evaluation process.

Three experiments examined how people gather information on in-group and out-group members. Previous studies have revealed that category-based expectancies bias the hypothesis-testing process towards confirmation through the use of asymmetric-confirming questions (which are queries where the replies supporting the prior expectancies are more informative than those falsifying them). However, to date there is no empirical investigation of the use of such a question-asking strategy in an intergroup context. In the present studies, participants were asked to produce (Study 1) or to choose (Studies 2 and 3) questions in order to investigate the presence of various traits in an in-group or an out-group member. Traits were manipulated by valence and typicality. The results revealed that category-based expectancies do not always lead to asymmetric-confirming testing: whereas participants tended to ask questions that confirmed positive in-group and negative out-group stereotypical attributes, they used a more symmetric strategy when testing for the presence of negative in-group or positive out-group traits. Moreover, Study 3 also revealed a moderation effect of in-group identification. The findings point to the role played by motivational factors associated with preserving a positive social identity. Possible consequences of these hypothesis-testing processes in preserving a positive social identity for intergroup relations are discussed.

This study investigates the influence of verbal and
non-verbal cues on people?s credibility judgments of fake Twitter
profiles generated by an information hiding mobile app solely for
transmitting secret messages. We tested the hypotheses that the
trustworthiness conveyed by the profile picture, morality-related
trait adjectives included in the profile summary and the profile
owner?s gender would increase people?s credibility judgments of
those fake Twitter profiles. 24 participants assessed 16 fake
profiles on their credibility. They also expressed their confidence
in their credibility judgements and they answered an open-ended
question on which parts of the profile influenced their credibility
judgements. The results showed that overall participants did not
trust the Twitter profiles. Furthermore, confidence judgements
were higher when profiles included competence-related traits in
the profile summaries. Verbal rather than non-verbal cues had
thus more influence on participants? judgements. The openended
responses revealed a large reliance on the content of the
profile, which is what the mobile app relies on. We discussed
these findings in light of the relative lack of credibility of the
profiles generated by the mobile app. The new insights can help
improve designs of systems depending on automated social media
accounts and will provide useful clues about other applications
where cognitive computing plays a role.

Cherubini P, Rusconi P, Russo S, Crippa F(2013)Missing the dog that failed to bark in the nighttime: On the overestimation of occurrences over non-occurrences in hypothesis testing, Psychological Research77(3)pp. 348-370

Trait inference in person perception is based on observers' implicit assumptions about the
relations between trait adjectives (e.g., fair) and the either consistent or inconsistent behaviors
(e.g., having double standards) that an actor can manifest. This article presents new
empirical data and theoretical interpretations on people' behavioral expectations, that is,
people's perceived trait-behavior relations along the morality (versus competence) dimension.
We specifically address the issue of the moderate levels of both traits and behaviors
almost neglected by prior research by using a measure of the perceived general frequency
of behaviors. A preliminary study identifies a set of competence- and morality-related traits
and a subset of traits balanced for valence. Studies 1±2 show that moral target persons are
associated with greater behavioral flexibility than immoral ones where abstract categories of
behaviors are concerned. For example, participants judge it more likely that a fair person
would behave unfairly than an unfair person would behave fairly. Study 3 replicates the
results of the first 2 studies using concrete categories of behaviors (e.g., telling the truth/
omitting some information). Study 4 shows that the positive asymmetry in morality-related
trait-behavior relations holds for both North-American and European (i.e., Italian) individuals.
A small-scale meta-analysis confirms the existence of a positive asymmetry in traitbehavior
relations along both morality and competence dimensions for moderate levels of
both traits and behaviors. We discuss these findings in relation to prior models and results
on trait-behavior relations and we advance a motivational explanation based on selfprotection.

Human cognitive modeling techniques and related software tools have been widely used by researchers and practitioners to evalu- ate the e ectiveness of user interface (UI) designs and related human performance. However, they are rarely used in the cyber security eld despite the fact that human factors have been recognized as a key ele- ment for cyber security systems. For a cyber security system involving a relatively complicated UI, it could be di cult to build a cognitive model that accurately captures the di erent cognitive tasks involved in all user interactions. Using a moderately complicated user authentication system as an example system and CogTool as a typical cognitive modeling tool, this paper aims to provide insights into the use of eye-tracking data for facilitating human cognitive modeling of cognitive tasks more e ectively and accurately.We used visual scan paths extracted from an eye-tracking user study to facilitate the design of cognitive modeling tasks. This al- lowed us to reproduce some insecure human behavioral patterns observed in some previous lab-based user studies on the same system, and more importantly, we also found some unexpected new results about human behavior. The comparison between human cognitive models with and without eye-tracking data suggests that eye-tracking data can provide useful information to facilitate the process of human cognitive modeling as well as to achieve a better understanding of security-related human behaviors. In addition, our results demonstrated that cyber security re- search can bene t from a combination of eye-tracking and cognitive mod- eling to study human behavior related security problems.

Previous studies have indicated that high status people are prone to use leading questions during interpersonal interaction. The present study (N = 254) aimed to investigate if asymmetry between high and low status individuals is likely to bias the social hypothesis testing toward asymmetric questions, namely queries for which the "yes" and the "no" answers are not equally diagnostic. To this purpose, after manipulating their status (supervisor vs. subordinate), participants were asked to choose questions to investigate the presence of attributes (positive or negative) in a social target. The results showed that higher status individuals are more likely to adopt the asymmetric confirming strategy during the social hypothesis-testing than lower status individuals. The potential application of this research is discussed.

The Attentional Blink (AB) is a temporary deficit for a second target (T2) when that target
appears after a first target (T1). Although sophisticated models have been developed to
explain the substantial AB literature in isolation, the current study considers how the AB
relates to perceptual dynamics more broadly. We show that the time-course of the AB is
closely related to the time course of the transition from positive to negative repetition priming
effects in perceptual identification. Many AB tasks involve a switch between a T1 defined in
one manner and a T2 defined in a different manner. Other AB tasks are non-switching, with
all targets belonging to the same well-known category (e.g., letter targets versus number
distractors) or sharing the same perceptual feature. We propose that these non-switching AB
tasks reflect perceptual habituation for the target-defining attribute; thus, a ?perceptual wink?,
with perception of one attribute (target identity) undisturbed while perception of another
(target detection) is impaired. On this account, the immediate benefit following T1 (lag-1
sparing) reflects positive repetition priming and the subsequent deficit (the blink) reflects
negative repetition priming for the realization that a target occurred. In developing the
perceptual wink model, we extended the nROUSE model of perceptual priming to explain the
results of two new experiments combining the AB and identity repetitions. This establishes
important connections between non-switching AB tasks and perceptual dynamics.

Despite all the information about the risks, many people still smoke. Several studies
investigated risk perceptions in smokers. The adequate perceptions of the risks from smoking
is particularly important and this study investigated the risk perception of young smokers vs
non-smokers by a new time-estimation task in which we required participants (smokers and
non-smokers) to estimate the onset time of smoking-related conditions in an average young
smoker. The findings supported our main hypothesis that smokers, compared to non-smokers,
postponed the onset of both mild and severe smoking-related conditions. The results also
revealed that the onset time estimates for mild conditions given by both smokers and nonsmokers
were associated with their self-perceptions of risk and level of fear of developing
smoking-related conditions. The findings cast light on smokers? distorted temporal perception
of the health-damaging consequences of smoking. Implications for the adequacy of risk
perception in smokers are discussed.